To dissolve, submerge, and cause to disappear the political or governmental system in the economic system by reducing, simplifying, decentralizing and suppressing, one after another, all the wheels of this great machine, which is called the Government or the State. --Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution

In recent talks, bilateral and multilateral, it's become more and more evident that the American negotiators' real purpose is to impose U.S. patent and copyright laws on the developing world as the price of access to U.S. markets.

An influential federal panel of medical advisers has recommended the government loosen regulations that severely limit the testing of pharmaceuticals on prison inmates, a practice that was all but stopped three decades ago after revelations of abuse....

Until the early 1970s, about 90 percent of all pharmaceutical products were tested on prison inmates, federal officials say....

Alvin Bronstein, a Washington lawyer who helped found the National Prison Project, an American Civil Liberties Union program, said he did not believe altering the regulations risked a return to the days of Holmesburg.

“With the help of external review boards that would include a prisoner advocate,” Bronstein said, “I do believe that the potential benefits of biomedical research outweigh the potential risks.”...

The discussion comes as the biomedical industry is facing a shortage of testing subjects. In the last two years, several pain medications, including Vioxx and Bextra, have been pulled off the market because early testing did not include large enough numbers of patients to catch dangerous problems.

This is not a complicated issue, folks. This is the "best available alternative" paradigm, but on steroids. The state is limiting the "available alternatives" in the most blatant and direct way possible, and then colluding with drug companies to present "voluntary" testing as an alternative. And don't forget, probably half of these inmates are imprisoned for consensual market transactions that shouldn't even be crimes in the first place. This stinks to high heaven.

The report noted different problems in every sector, but a few kept popping up almost across the board: A growing population, and growing demand that is overtaxing aging, inadequate systems....

There’s also increased international trade and movement of goods within the country. That means more and more commercial trucks prowling the interstates at all hours. Whether you’re talking about seaports, airports, railroads, canals, or highways, our transport systems need to expand to keep up with our economic activity.

But we haven’t been keeping up....

Another example of the kind of mainstream liberal goo-goo who thinks the Interstate Highway System was some great example of "progressive" government intervention--despite the fact that it was built for "defense" purposes under the direction of a former GM president, the same guy responsible for that "What's good for America is good for GM" quote. Apparently it never occurred to Kulish that subsidized transport systems can never "expand to keep up with economic activity," precisely because the divorce of consumption from the cost principle generates demand faster than they can accommodate it.

Jesse Walker writes on the increased size of the welfare state a decade after "welfare reform," and notes (with the great quote below from Piven and Cloward's Regulating the Poor) that there's little direct relationship between the amount of spending and tangible benefits to the poor:

...social welfare activity has not greatly aided the poor, precisely because the poor ordinarily have very little influence on government. Indeed, 'social welfare' programs designed for other groups frequently ride roughshod over the poor, as when New Deal agricultural subsidies resulted in the displacement of great numbers of tenant farmers and sharecroppers, or when urban renewal schemes deprived blacks of their urban neighborhoods.

Indeed, as I often like to say, a vulgar libertarian is someone who thinks the food stamp program came about through the massive political influence of unemployed single mothers, rather than the agribusiness lobby.

...Rakesh may have found an instance of Lovaglia’s Law: "The more important the outcome of a decision, the more people will resist using evidence to make it."...

Rakesh described how directors of huge companies had enormous faith in the power of CEOs that went beyond anything that could be justified by any research, how they spent vast amounts of money and time searching for new corporate saviors, and paid out huge sums to executive search firms and to the CEOs they ultimately hired. Following Lovaglia’s Law, perhaps because these decisions were so important, Rakesh found that when he asked corporate directors if CEOs are worth all that money, they reacted with anger and surprise, as if he had raised a taboo subject. He found that they had “virtually religious” convictions on the subject, which led them to dismiss any evidence showing that CEO quality is not a primary and powerful cause of company performance.

I previously linked, in an earlier weekly digest, to a Bob Murphy article critical of an agribusiness critic, and Carlton Hobbs' comments in response. Hobbs developed his critique of Murphy's article into an article of his own. He also has some insightful comments on the possibility that an outside hostile government could manipulate the markets of a free market anarchy in order to undermine its independence.

11 Comments:

Reisman's Ghost said...

It's time we set this whole child-labor thing straight.

"Exploitation of the weak"? Pshaw. Child labor violates noone's rights and would be common in a libertarian society. If "children as young as six" are working in factories, that shows their exceptional initiative. Sure, working for "up to 19 hours" seems a little extreme, but it's their voluntary choice among the existing alternatives, and as we know from Austrian economics voluntary transactions benefit both parties. Therefore children benefited from child labor.

"Children were paid only a fraction of what an adult would get"? Well of course! Children with their disruptive nature and lack of skill would undoubtedly have lower marginal revenue product, which translates into lower wages in a free market.

"The treatment of children in factories was often cruel and unusual, and the children's safety was generally neglected." This is easy to explain via standard economic theory. By the law of the invisible hand, unprofitable factories in a free-market would go bankrupt. During this period of the Industrial Revolution, most factories treated children cruelly and endangered them. Therefore, we infer that the ones that treated them well or paid too much attention to their safety were not profitable and went out of business. Hence the cruel and abusive overseers were the best available alternative the market could provide these children. Hey, it's better than starving!

"An overseer would tie a heavy weight to worker's neck, and have them walk up and down the factory aisles so the other children could see them and 'take example.'" Naturally! If you don't discipline problem workers, the rest will start to get out of line and productivity will suffer. Increased productivity is good for the economy. What's good for the economy is good for children. Therefore, "weighting" bad child workers is actually good for them!

The proposal to test more drugs on prisoners is really scary. Regardless of how the system is set up, it seems like it would provide incentive for poltiicians to lock-up more Americans.

It reminds me of a Larry Niven story (Jigsaw Man, I believe), where the protaganist is sentenced to death over a speeding ticket, so that his organs can be harvested for transplant.

I suspect that the regulations should stay as they are, but a few particluar questions burn me:

1) Do the prisons benefit from this testing (funding or medical services)?2) Do prisoners get special treatment for participation in the testing (if this is "contributing to the greater good", then does it get them out of jail early?)

reisman's ghost: I don't see the problem being child labor being wrong, so much as the mistreatment of labor in general being wrong.

"During this period of the Industrial Revolution, most factories treated children cruelly and endangered them."

Yes, but how did these same factories treat adults? Not much better. Of course forbidding almost all labor to anyone under 16 is one way to somewhat improve the labor conditions of adults, as it does reduce the supply of labor.

As far as free market theory is concerned, there is essentially nothing wrong with your comments. There is, however, a big problem with your position here...

Free market arguments are not applicable in an unfree market. The status quo is extremely unfree in this regard.

Doing so amounts to a perversion of libertarianism, one that fuels the standard characterization by nonlibertarians that libertarians are nothing but "pot-smoking Republicans". Actually exising capitalism has notbing to do with free enterprise.

It would be far preferrable to use free market arguements such as the ones you used here as a critique of the status quo. Use them to show how the number of options for workers would be immensely greater in a free market, which would be a contributor to the decline of exploitative conditions.

Libertarianism needs to be purged of such vulgar tendencies amongst libertarians who may otherwise have the right idea. Defending the status quo is not libetarian. This is why leftists are, at best, distrustful of libetarians.

If you want to read about the "good old days" the first time around,(drug testing on prisoners) check out "Acres of Skin" by Allen Hornblum. It's worse than you think. For example, the prisoner pool they pulled from included people who couldn't post bail, and were just waiting for trial.

The book's also a good look at the ability of well-intentioned people to justify all sorts of evil when it suits their purposes, even when they really know better (many of the doctors involved were on the forefront of criticizing Nazi war experiments).

Something else that "vulgar libertarians" can't seem to understand is that the open borders/illegal immigration they are so fond of is in many ways due to the federal instate system, which, as was pointed out, was built for federal military transport.

Actually I didn't realize the Springsteen connection until you brought it to my attention. My actual inspiration came from old video games from the 90s where a villain would be killed only to reappear later as a more savage and powerful palette-swapped ghost (thus saving programmer effort). Considering how the real Reisman acts I figured an argument this vile and devious could be made by none other than -- dun, don, dun, dun, DUUUUNNN -- Reisman's Ghost.

Incidentally the real Reisman seems to have forgotten about you and your puny, "insignificant" philosophy completely and is now on an environmentalism kick. His latest claim? That environmentalism contributes to terrorism!